


down, down, down

by scheherazade



Category: Germany National Football Team RPF
Genre: Alternate Universe - Reincarnation, Alternate Universe - Soulmates, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-12-18
Updated: 2018-12-18
Packaged: 2019-09-21 16:16:44
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,834
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17046845
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/scheherazade/pseuds/scheherazade
Summary: His name isn't always Thomas but it's always Miro he's searching for.





	down, down, down

**Author's Note:**

  * For [engine](https://archiveofourown.org/users/engine/gifts).



In this life he meets Lisa first. She's smart and funny and beautiful and Thomas doesn't need his friends' constant ribbing to know that he's punched so far up he might as well have clocked an angel in the face.

The day he turns eighteen he asks her to marry him. Holger sends an engagement gift and then tells Thomas he's an idiot, because what if she doesn't want to be a pretty football trophy wife once he gets a professional contract and maybe has to leave Munich or even the country? Thomas lists out twenty-seven ways in which Holger is the idiot. Lisa is his best friend and they're going to be together in this life and the next. 

"You know soulmates don't actually exist, right?" Holger says. Thomas nutmegs him instead of responding. Of course soulmates exist. Just because it didn't happen the way it happens in fairytales—the instant knowing, promises of lifetimes ago and lifetimes still to come, the call of _you_ to _I_ pulling him under with the force of rising tides—doesn't mean Lisa is any less the one.

Twelve months later Klinsmann adds him to the squad for the pre-season friendlies. Thomas shows up to training an hour early, dawdles in his car as he watches staff and trainers slowly trickle in. An old BMW pulls up and instead of a physio or groundskeeper, the person who steps out from the driver's side is someone that Thomas recognizes from TV. 

He's out of his car and walking over before his brain has fully caught up. _Say something, jackass,_ the horrified part of his brain demands as the man stops to hold the door for him. Christ. Bayern's star striker, regular starter and national team hero, holding the door for a nobody. He probably looks like a ball boy. 

"Thanks," he says and mentally kicks himself again. "I'm, uh, Thomas. Thomas Muller. I'm joining the team for the day—"

"Oh, you must be who the trainers were talking about." Which—what? Trainers? Talking? About him? "You're coming with us for pre-season, aren't you?" A smile that momentarily unfurrows those brows. "It's nice to meet you, Thomas. Call me Miro."

Thomas takes the proffered hand while his brain is still trying to catch up with all of that. Not that it matters, as everything immediately goes out the window because Miroslav Klose is smiling and shaking his hand and someone has pulled the rug or possibly the whole earth from under his feet as Thomas remembers—he _remembers_ —the memories come flooding back and he's drowning in lifetimes of longing and waiting and _Miro Miro Miro_.

In other lives he was a soldier, a street rat, a stableboy, a wanted man. He carries memories of forgotten worlds, ruins giving birth to new cities and glories before being razed to the ground and on and on again. His name isn't always Thomas but it's always Miro he's searching for and they always find each other, somehow, someway.

Because as it turns out, it's exactly like the fairytales. Except.

There's an engagement ring on his finger. A gold band adorns Miro's hand. They don't match, of course they don't. In this life Miro already has a family—he's seen Sylwia in magazine photos, at Miro's side—and all Thomas can think is _no, no, god no, not again._

Miro isn't smiling anymore. He's still holding Thomas' hand and there's something desperate and helpless in the tension of his fingers, and Thomas knows what he's going to say even before he opens his mouth because he's Miro and an oath is an oath, doesn't matter whether it's a vow he made for one lifetime or the hundreds and thousands of promises he's made to Thomas across continents and centuries, every one a latch on his soul. As if Thomas would run away even if he could.

"Thomas," Miro says, and Thomas lets go of his hand before Miro can say another word. He might not know what to do next or how any of this ends but he does know one thing: he's not letting Miro push him away again. Even if he has a good reason. Not this time. 

"So the trainers have been talking about me, huh?" He steps back from Miro with a crooked smile. "I better give them something real to talk about. You just wait, old man. Stick around a couple seasons, and you'll see."

They'll all see, Thomas decides as he walks away. He's going to get on the first team and then the national team and he's going to win everything there is to win. He's going to be the greatest striker or winger or playmaker they've ever seen. Hell, they'll invent a whole new position for him before this is over. They'll remember him, and they'll remember him in the same breath as Miroslav Klose and the greatest of the greats. 

He's going to be somebody, dammit. He's going to be somebody even Miro can't ignore. 

 

* * *

 

Miro found him on the day he was to be married and said, "I'm sorry," before kissing Thomas for the first and last time in that particular life.

 

* * *

 

Bern, 1954. West Germany had no business being in a World Cup final, but here they were. When it started to rain Thomas tugged his flat cap over his hair and grinned. _Fritz Walter weather,_ he remarked to the men around him who laughed and echoed the words back and back in the stands. Cheerfully grim, or maybe grimy was the word. It seemed right that even humor would feel a bit like dirt after the war.

At halftime, a journalist with a pencil tucked into his hat searched his pockets and came up empty. A cigarette dangled from his lips. The score was only 2-1 in favor of the Hungarians, so Thomas offered his own matchbox. The man accepted the light with a look of thanks. His accent sounded Polish when he asked Thomas if he played. Thomas gestured at the cane resting at his hip.

"I'm sorry," the journalist said, and Thomas scoffed at him. There was no reason to go around feeling sorry for young men who were alive and more or less well. Being alive was the important part.

"My brother played football," Thomas said instead. "He would have been thirty this year." 

"Would have?"

"Ardennes Offensive." Thomas shrugged. "Never found out what happened to most of his unit, but the ones they did find, they found in pieces." The journalist winced; Thomas noted that they looked about the same age. "What about you? Wouldn't you rather be playing instead of writing about football?"

"I can scratch out a living working for the paper. Football, not so much."

"Someday," Thomas said as he often did, and Simon used to laugh at him before he went off to war. "One day soon, they'll pay footballers a proper wage. Proper professional." The journalist gave him a skeptical look but he didn't laugh, so Thomas continued, "If a man can get rich playing around with soldiers' lives, then surely he can earn a living wage playing football."

"I suppose anything is possible. For example, the West Germans might yet hold on for a full forty-five minutes. Or even extra time."

"Nah. They'll score two more, nick the trophy from right under the Hungarians' beaks and be remembered forever as folk legends. The Heroes of Bern. Got a nice ring to it, don't you think?"

The journalist laughed. "I like your optimism." He had a nice smile, Thomas thought as the man put out his cigarette and offered his hand. "My name's Miro, by the way." 

"Thomas." He shook the journalist's hand. "It's nice to meet you—"

 

* * *

 

_"—Miro, do you hear me? Just wait, damn you. Won't be long. You'll see. I'll see you soon. I'll find you again and it won't take so long this time. You'll be young and so will I, and it won't be like this, next time, I swear."_

_He was barely coherent even to his own ears, but could you blame him when Miro was dying in his arms, the world ending all around them in blasted dirt and bloody gunpowder smoke. Miro's chest shuddered under his hands. Thomas could feel his ribs creak, maybe broken, not that he could tell with all the shrapnel and blood._

_"Don't you dare." Voice barely audible over the shrieking sound of war, Miro gripped his hand. "Get out of here and live a long life. Don't you dare follow me."_

 

* * *

 

And how is he supposed to do that, Thomas never has the heart to ask. How is he supposed to live a long life when Miro leaves taking half his soul with him—pulls him helpless down with the weight of gravity— _wait for me, I won't be long_ —and there's nothing, absolutely nothing that Thomas can do except follow the call of _Miro_ down, down, down—

 

* * *

 

In this life they find each other years too late. But even that doesn't matter because Thomas decided he's not going away, not even if Miro treats him like a kid when he's in fact the other half of his soul's orbit through centuries of empires and war and worse. 

Holger makes fun of him for being so completely starstruck. Worse, Holger makes fun of him in front of Toni, who repeats the joke to Mats and Manu, and by the end of the three-day training camp the entire squad and half the trainers are using his "crush" as a measuring stick for all instances of affection platonic or otherwise.

It follows him back to the Bayern dressing room. Miro ignores it with a quiet dignity that cows even the worst offenders. Thomas has no such luck, and frankly doesn't want it. Dignity is overrated. 

And what does it matter anyway, when Miro is here and so is he. He signs a full professional contract with Bayern and the future is opening door after door, and the ones that stay shut, Thomas isn't adverse to kicking down through sheer force. He's here and he's part of Miro's life, because Miro is always there and Thomas always already knew.

Thomas knows where to go on the pitch when he has Miro in the edge of his sight, knows he can run in loping lines that make Holger complain about his freaky ability to disappear in broad daylight, damn you Muller, because no matter how tricky invisible he makes himself with his movements, Miro is always there in the right place at the right time, right where you need him to be. Miro is always there. No matter where or how far he runs, Miro is there when Thomas needs him to be.

 

* * *

 

Sometimes it was years, sometimes decades, but they always found each other before the end. In one life Thomas answered the call to crusade in the name of God and emperor. He didn't really believe in holiness or empire, but an adventure was an adventure, and the edge of the world sounded a lot better than working the farm 'til the end of his days. In that life he followed his king across mountains and plains and rivers swollen with rain. When the last river took the king, Thomas didn't have the breath to spare for either prayer or grief as the crossing became a retreat became a fight to keep his head above water.

A knight on horseback shouted at him to take hold of the saddle, and somehow Thomas did. Somehow he managed not to get his head kicked in as the beast struggled back to shore. The knight offered his arm to help him stand, Thomas took it, and then he was drowning all over again in another place, another lifetime—the shadow of a walled city, the wailing of women in a language long lost, fire and ships and warriors by the thousands gleaming bronze and blood—and when he looked up, the knight was staring at him. 

Before he could say _It's you, it's you,_ the screaming began. He turned his head to see a volley of arrows from the opposite bank. Hundreds of arrows blotting out the sun like a murder of crows. Miro's hand tightened on his, yanking him to his feet and across the saddle like a sodden sack of grain, and Thomas wanted to laugh and scream and curse God all at once because _I found you, at last, at last,_ and it was already too late. 

 

* * *

 

He wins the Golden Boot in South Africa, Miro beside him and ahead of him, the whole world watching and learning his name. He silences Maradona and Messi. England, Argentina, and then Spain—well. He scores against Uruguay and they take home a medal. Not the one that Miro wants or deserves, but Miro sits with him and squeezes his shoulder and tells him, _next time._ Because there's always a next time, even though what matters is _this time_. Thomas decided that. He tells Miro as much. 

"We're winning the whole damn thing in four years. So you better be there, or I'll drag your octogenarian ass to Brazil myself to watch me accomplish everything you said you would."

"Is that right." Miro sounds like he wants to laugh. He looks like he's spent years trying not to cry. He does neither, tangles his fingers in Thomas' unruly hair as if he, too, needs something to hold.

 

* * *

 

"Stowaway!" came the bellowing call. The first mate's voice boomed loud as cannons on open water, and open water was where they were when Thomas was dragged out from the crates he'd used to smuggle himself on board. Less than half a day out from port. He could probably swim back if the captain threw him overboard.

But the captain didn't. The captain grilled him on his origins and his motives—deemed unremarkable and dimwitted, respectively—and gave him a blood-curdling lecture on debts and responsibility and a man's worth measured in trustworthiness and plain hard work.

"Up," said the captain, just as Thomas was wondering whether being thrown overboard might not have been the greater mercy. "You'll work and you'll work hard, and you'll learn to follow orders if you want to survive this journey. Do you understand?"

Thomas nodded. The captain gave a soundless sigh. "Get up then, and get to work."

Thomas scrambled to his feet from where he'd been forced to kneel and promptly tripped over a coil of rope. The crew snickered. The captain irritably hauled him upright again, and the disorientation that punched through Thomas had nothing to do with the roiling deck or the knowledge that this was now well and truly his future for at least the next eighteen months, and eighteen months may be longer than the remainder of his days as for all he knew they could be raided or sunk somewhere past Spain or Africa or some distant land he'd never even heard of.

But even the idea of sailing off the edge of the world couldn't scare him right then. He leaned on the captain's arm, and Miro looked at him like he was seeing the ghost of a beloved lost to the sea. He might have been. The memories were too crowded to provide much detail, only the knowledge that Miro had been there as Miro was now here, and Thomas was and always would be waiting and searching for him by land or sea or stars.

 

* * *

 

They lose the league to Dortmund. People come, and people leave. Miro goes to Italy.

"It's not like you'll never see him again," Manu says in lieu of good morning. He puts on his gloves, flexing his wrist thoughtfully before tightening the straps. "Euro qualifiers start soon. And you can always go visit if you want. You don't stop being friends just because you go to another club."

"You talking to me or yourself?" Thomas gets a swat to the head for his trouble. He makes a mental note to give Manu as much shit about it as humanly possible the next time they're called up to the national team. "How're they taking it back home, anyway? Last I heard, you got excommunicated from the miners' guild or something?"

Manu kicks a football at his head this time. "Grow up. Even Miro's not gonna put up with you forever."

And that's debatable, Thomas doesn't say. Forever is a long time, sure, but if it comes right down to it Thomas wouldn't bet against himself when it comes to outlasting eternity.

 

* * *

 

On the eve of the war to end all wars, Miro was a radical, a propagandist, a rabble-rousing agitator in support of universal suffrage and other dangerous ideas, a wanted man and enemy of the aristocrats clinging to the last vestiges of their power as the world turned on the heavy wheels of time and industry.

 _Watch out for that one,_ well-dressed friends said in cultured tones of disdain. _Your family at least has sense, Thomas, despite where they came from. No offense. But that one, he's dangerous._

That thin bespectacled man, dangerous? Absurd, Thomas thought privately while outwardly he smiled and waved aside their disdain with calculated carelessness. It was a game, all of it, and Thomas played for lack of anything better to do. His grandfather had made their wealth in steel and industry, and Thomas frittered away his allotment of the family fortune among the gentry, friend to many and caring for none.

The radical, though—the soft-spoken man whose eyes were so very expressive, even behind those hideous wire-rimmed specs—Thomas rather fancied seeing what dangerous ideas he might induce the man to express. His wealthy friends would be horrified, possibly scandalized, and the thought made Thomas want to bare his teeth. It was a game, and it was past time he changed the rules. 

So he talked sweetly and danced lightly until the radical fell into his lap, the way they always did, and Thomas barely had a moment to bask in his victory before it all came crashing down the moment he touched Miro's face—before he even got a chance to kiss Miro's lips—he remembered Byzantium and Bavaria, the banks of the Elbe and the far shores of the earth where he once promised, _Wait for me, wherever you go, wait for me, and I'll find you again._

The spectacles fell to the floor. In this life Miro's eyes were green and flecked with gold.

"I found you," Thomas breathed out when he could breathe again. "I found you, just like I said."

 

* * *

 

In Fortaleza his eyes are fixed on the ball when he jumps and afterwards it's hard to tell whether the flicker of red in the corner of his vision was the defender's sleeve or a premonition. He goes down in a crunch of vertigo, and when he opens his eyes again Miro is hovering over him. 

"Can you hear me?" Miro is saying. "Focus on me, Thomas. On me."

And that's silly, because when has Miro been anything less than the center of his world? Thomas opens his mouth to tell him as much and pain radiates through his skull. His nose feels funny. His lip and tongue taste like copper. 

There's blood on Miro's white jersey, a handprint. Thomas reaches for him and discovers that the shape matches his palm. _I got you all bloody,_ he tries to say. He tries to turn his head and Miro's hands are holding him still. 

"Don't move," Miro says. "Just focus on me. The doctors are coming. How bad does it hurt?"

It's not so bad, Thomas tries and can't say. He's still winded from the fall. He breathes and focuses on Miro's hand against his cheek. The grass tickles the back of his neck, and it's not so bad because Miro is here where he always should be, and it's familiar and fleeting, the bitterness of waiting and the endless wanting and _wanting_ —

 

* * *

 

There were wars upon wars, kings and bishops and empires that rose and fell. He lived lives of servitude and lives of careless wealth. In one Thomas went west with the knights to find land of his own in Silesia, where there was freedom and hope and a dark-eyed man whose life and land would border and merge with his.

In another life Thomas was raised in a monastery. Five years to the day he'd taken his oaths he found a beggar on the same steps where he'd been abandoned as a child. Thomas offered him shelter, fed and clothed the beggar the way other holy men had done for him in the past. Miro didn't believe, but it was Thomas whose faith was shaken when he took Miro's hand in prayer and the words died on his lips. The Black Death came that winter, and Thomas stayed even when the others fled. This was all he'd ever known, he'd taken his oaths and Miro was one of the first taken ill before God took him for good. Even as prophets cried the end of days, even as the sickness took the people and the land, Thomas knew it wasn't the end. It couldn't be, when he could feel Miro calling to him as he always had been, already waiting at the next time and place they would meet.

The next life and the next, in mercenary companies and crumbling craftsmen's guilds, through a hard winter when Miro took in a street rat who'd tried to rob him in his sleep, and Thomas stayed with him through a lifetime of work and hunger and never once complained. 

Centuries turned upon centuries. Thomas became a writer in a fragmented Germany that barely deserved the name. In the backwater of Europe, envying the luxuries of thought and enlightenment that flourished in France and Spain. _To hell with God and Goethe,_ Thomas said to the cheers of his classmates and fellow writers, behind closed doors and in crowded pubs. Miro never came to the public houses, but behind closed doors he read and praised Thomas' work and urged him to be cautious, until one day Thomas threw caution to the wind and kissed him the way he'd wanted to for longer than he knew. ("Let's find a new world in the next life," Thomas said in the darkness of his rooms. "Somewhere better. Somewhere we can live.") Miro never contradicted him, but neither did he say yes.

 

* * *

 

In Fortaleza Miro waits for him after the final whistle. His jersey is still stained with Thomas' blood. Other than that he looks exactly the same as when he'd walked out onto the pitch. 

"Congratulations, legend," Thomas says. "I always knew you'd break Ronaldo's record."

"Of course you did."

"Never in doubt."

"Of course not."

"I'm hurt that you don't believe me, you know. Considering my years of adoring hero worship and all. I mean, is there anyone you'd trust more than me?"

"Thomas."

The tunnel echoes with the clattering of studded boots. They're going to be late for the team meeting. Miro is silhouetted by the stadium, everything echoing oddly as he says, 

"I'm retiring after this, whatever happens."

 

* * *

 

There was one life where they grew up together, neighbors, inseparable from birth. In that life they always knew and knowing changed everything. In that life Thomas kissed Miro for the first time in the meadow behind the church on a summer day when they were both fourteen, awkward and gangly and growing wild as felt-thorned weeds. Miro never questioned the fact of them and Thomas never doubted that they would have forever, if only this once. Sister Agatha caught them two weeks later, and in that life they never saw each other again.

 

* * *

 

"Get over it, will you? Maybe everyone has a soulmate, and maybe it's even all true like you think it is. It still doesn't mean your life has to revolve around them. For one, that's stupid. I'd never do that to someone, and I wouldn't ask them to do it for me, either."

"Yeah," Thomas says slowly, "except for the part where you can't have a soulmate when you obviously don't have a soul."

He ducks when Manu punts the football at his head with frankly unnerving accuracy considering he's a goalkeeper and not a midfielder, for all that he's done his best to fool the whole damn world. 

His life doesn't revolve around Miro, and Miro's certainly doesn't revolve around him. They watch Luan and Noah Klose grow from little humans into fully fledged humans. At home Lisa starts talking about baby names, and Thomas gives her increasingly ridiculous suggestions until she either laughs or slams a door in disgust at his childish tendencies. She always forgives him, though. She's his best friend, that much hasn't and won't ever change.

Football doesn't change, even when Miro hangs up his boots. Thomas can't begrudge him that, not after he's done everything he set out to do and more. Even if he wants to scream at the unfairness of it all, having Miro always there but never really having him at all. They've had years and years and it still isn't enough.

They could have had a life free from fear, this time around. The world is newer, kinder, better than before. But they didn't, because they had football and everything else. _Stay,_ Thomas wants to ask or maybe demand or beg. _Stay with me for as long as you can this time, because this time you have a choice. Choose me. Stay._

And Miro does stay but he stays on the sidelines as Thomas keeps playing, and the empty space where he used to be—on the pitch, at his side—is too much like the space where Miro always should have been in every iteration of _you_ and _I_.

 

* * *

 

The first time, the very first time, when all he knew was that this was something he couldn't outrun because it was as terrifying as it was true, Miro was a poet and Thomas was his patron's second son. Miro wrote verses to entertain his father's guests. He composed lyrics that made the women sigh. And in quiet afternoons when the trees were full of birds, the fields warm and gold with wheat, Miro wove dreams for Thomas and Thomas alone.

 _I wrote something for you,_ Thomas said one day. _It's short. It's barely a couplet. I tried, but it's—well, just read it._

Miro took the tablet and Thomas' hands as well. The letters were clumsy, but surely legible from this distance, and short enough to be understood at a glance. _I would like you to read it to me,_ Miro said. So Thomas did.

He stumbled twice over his own couplet. A moment passed, one endless bated breath. Then Miro took his hands again and pressed a kiss to the clumsy fingers that wrote and to the artless lips that spoke of love and perpetuity. His words were laughably inadequate, though Miro said nothing of it then or ever again, but Thomas knew from that moment, and would learn again and again through all the years to come.

 

* * *

 

In the next life Thomas will walk into lecture on a snowy December day, ready to claim his usual seat in the back and tune out the professor for the next hour while he buys a train ticket and finishes his Christmas shopping and answers his mother's increasingly passive-aggressive messages as to when, exactly, he's planning on coming home for the holidays this year.

He'll shoulder through the swinging double doors and nearly collide with someone on the other side. A sheaf of lecture notes will flutter to the ground, as a graduate student blinks at him from behind a pair of owlish glasses.

On the blackboard will be a lesson plan written out in chalk, along with a note tacked on almost as an afterthought: _Dr. Elgert is out today. Mr. Klose will be your guest lecturer._

Chalk and blackboard. How old fashioned, Thomas will think. And how exactly like Miro, to treasure these things still.

"Sorry about that," he'll say as he crouches down to help pick up the scattered papers. His hand brushing Miro's, earning him a stern look. Miro will already have a couple worry lines, but more importantly he'll be young and alive, and when Thomas smiles at him he'll smile right back.

"Didn't mean to surprise you like that, honest." Thomas will drop his bag on a seat in the very first row, right next to Miro's carefully draped jacket and scarf. "Let me make it up to you, say, over coffee? Or maybe something a little stronger?"

And that's when Miro will make a sound somewhere between a laugh and a sigh. "I suppose it would be rude to refuse, since you're so generously offering."

"It would indeed," Thomas will cheerfully reply. "That's settled then. It's a date."

**Author's Note:**

> HAPPY YULETIDE, FROM YOUR MESS OF A WRITER <3 s/o to a heroic effort by my beta reader. all remaining typos are completely my stupidass fault.


End file.
